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A Novel as Big as America

Near the end of his vast new historical novel, “A Moment in the Sun,” John Sayles describes a street performer who “built an elaborate house of tiles on his little table, balancing one upon the other till the structure was almost up to his chin.” Spectators bet against “the master architect” and his precarious creation, but he keeps adding tiles and winning wagers. This performer is, of course, a stand-in for Sayles himself, who has also built an elaborate house of tiles and managed, against all odds, to keep it standing. The book opens in 1897, the year of the Klondike gold rush, and closes in 1903, the year after the Philippine-American War ended, and in between it takes the measure of America on the brink of the 20th century.

“A Moment in the Sun” is, it should be said, nearly 1,000 pages long. Sayles responds to readers’ presumed resentment against its bulk (a resentment canceled for some by the e-book) by offering reliable entertainment: with its impersonations of political figures, fraught romances and life-threatening adventures, the book is akin to the “Variety Arts” show one character attends.

Variety is further served by alternating the narrative among four culturally diverse perspectives. The Western rover Hod Brackenridge, a former farmer and fired miner, goes to the Yukon, gets cheated out of his stake, becomes a boxer in fixed fights and, on the run from the law, enlists in the Army in Colorado. Tutored by an African-American and then a Native American, goodhearted Hod is an adult Huck Finn in the territory, and a consistently pleasurable presence.

Hod’s superior officer, Niles Manigault, is another rambler and a gambler, the ne’er-do-well son of a judge in Wilmington, N.C., where Niles’s intellectual brother, Harry, is at odds with their Confederate veteran father. In the later stages of the book, the war-profiteering Niles becomes a politician while Harry moves to New York and finds his vocation making movies.

Wilmington is also home to the third group of characters — the African-­American Dr. Lunceford; his teenage daughter, Jessie; his son, Junior, an aspiring “New Negro”; and Junior’s friend Royal Scott, who loves without hope the higher-class Jessie. Inspired by newspaper propaganda (“remember the maine!”), Junior and Royal enlist to fight the Spanish in Cuba. Not long after they return home in 1898, race riots break out in Wilmington, where prominent whites like Niles’s father deprived blacks of their voting rights and legal residences.

As the novel progresses, Hod, Niles, Junior and Royal ship out to battle in the Philippines — a military intervention, in Sayles’s presentation, as legally dubious as the one in Cuba and as racist as the riots in Wilmington. In the Pacific, Sayles introduces his fourth set of characters: the Jesuit-educated and Manila-­refined Diosdado Concepcíon and the peasant farmer Bayani Pandoc, who rebel against the Spanish, fight a series of losing battles against the American occupiers and cross paths with Niles and Royal.

Photo

John SaylesCredit
Illustration by Grafilu

Sayles combines these narratives skillfully so they refresh the reader’s curiosity, have plausible literal intersections and build to a comprehensive representation of American political violence at home and abroad. The novel’s many crowd scenes provide frequent dramatic intensity. ­Sayles begins with Yukon prospectors rushing with greed and fight fans lusting for blood, segues to mass assaults in Cuba and mob violence in Wilmington, then moves on to villages of victims in the Philippines.

The director of 17 movies, including “Amigo” (set in the Philippines and scheduled for release later this year), and the author of three other novels including “Union Dues,” Sayles knows how to balance his cinematic crowds with novelistic inwardness. Yet “A Moment in the Sun” remains, like that stack of tiles, precarious and risky in its joining of different fictional styles. The book mentions both Harriet Beecher Stowe and, in a winking reference, a bicycle racer named Pynchon (Sayles once called “Gravity’s Rainbow” the “best ‘big’ book I know”).

In its scale, multiple plots, rigorous attention to setting and technology, colloquial exactitude, race consciousness and suspicion of political power, “A Moment in the Sun” is admirably Pynchonian. But Sayles sometimes flirts with Stowe’s sentimentality — particularly when some of the African-Americans move to New York City and new female characters are introduced. Women are brought low by poverty, and men have a soft spot for prostitutes and widows. Children are ragged and sick. Although I prefer the Pynchonian elements, I admit I had moist eyes at several points; Sayles is a master of both architecture and affect.

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He is also a master of the set piece, the local story that eventually and surprisingly fits into the bigger narrative. His method is usually oblique, piquing the reader’s interest with an initially odd perspective. After President McKinley’s assassination is briefly described through the eyes of the assassin, for instance, the next chapter begins, “They all want to be put wise and expect Shoe to come up with the dope.” Shoe has not appeared before; he enters the novel as an inmate in the prison where the assassin is ultimately electrocuted. Like many of the book’s characters, high and low, he is guilty of fraud — in his case, a fixed horse race that recalls fixed fights in the boxing ring and in foreign theaters of war where bully Uncle Sam carries a big stick.

In writing about the turn of the 20th century, Sayles keeps one eye fixed on technology. Shoe and the other prisoners think of their improvised chain of communication as a telegraph; yellow journalists assert that the Maine was blown up by an “infernal machine”; Diosdado watches an execution by “the screw.” The rioters in Wilmington display a Gatling gun. Other machines, including the linotype and the movie camera, may also have “infernal” effects, but nothing like the prison’s electric chair. The novel closes with a crowd watching the electrocution of an elephant at Coney Island — an ironic comment on the superior technology that defeated Spain and on violence as mass entertainment.

Not every episode is equally rich. Several brief chapters supply canned background through a generic Hearst cartoonist, and others offer pedagogical cameos by such figures as the anti-imperialist Mark Twain and Leon Czolgosz, McKinley’s assassin. Nor are the major characters equally engaging. Although Sayles’s sympathies are clearly with the Filipino people, and he spends considerable energy on local color and the islands’ cultures, Diosdado remains essentially an idealistic aristocrat and Bayani a canny peasant. When Sayles introduces a rogue Chinese woman sold into prostitution in the Philippines, where she eventually marries a central character, some readers may feel this is one tile too many, but no single episode or aesthetic overreach can shake the well-­founded monument of “A Moment in the Sun.”

This novel will probably be praised as a distant mirror of contemporary history, of Vietnam and Iraq, and it is that. But its true importance lies not in its rearview relevance but in its commitment to recalling in heroic detail a little-known and contradictory historical moment, a sunny time of American pride but also of hubris in sun-beaten locales: North Carolina, Cuba, the Philippines. Ultimately, Sayles differs from both Stowe, who wanted her melodrama to change reality, and Pynchon, who mixes his wacky inventions with his encyclopedic knowledge. More than once, Sayles describes performers as “channels.” He also satirizes a newspaper editor who says, “We mustn’t let mere facts stand in the way of larger truths.” Sayles is not a neutral channel, but in his respect for facts both documented and extrapolated, he is devoted to offering us a new understanding of the past.

A MOMENT IN THE SUN

By John Sayles

955 pp. McSweeney’s Books. $29.

Tom LeClair is the author of “The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction.”

A version of this review appears in print on June 12, 2011, on Page BR8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: America Unbound. Today's Paper|Subscribe